Epidemiology of moyamoya disease

Moyamoya disease has a high incidence in East Asian countries, and many large-scale epidemiological surveys of this disease have been conducted in East-Asian countries such as Japan and Republic of Korea. In the early 1970s, several surveys first reported the epidemiological features of moyamoya disease in Japan. Since 1977, a research committee on moyamoya disease, established by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Japan (RCMJ), has studied the epidemiology of this disease, and four nationwide surveys were conducted in Japan in 1984, 1990, 1995, and 2003 [1-5]. In Republic of Korea, a survey of moyamoya disease was first conducted in 1988, and several reports on the epidemiology of this disease in Republic of Korea have been published [6, 7]. In this chapter, we will review the epidemiology of moyamoya disease by investigating data mainly from these two countries.